Civil Service: Politicisation

Lord Waldegrave of North Hill Excerpts

Thursday 28th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Waldegrave of North Hill (Con)]

My Lords, I too thank and congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Butler of Brockwell, who will be embarrassed when I say that he is one of the pre-eminent public servants of this era, but it is true. I shared a room with him in the Cabinet Office in 1971 when I was a civil servant, before I left to be one of two political appointees in the political office of the Prime Minister, the other being Lord Hurd.

I take it for granted that there should be now, as in the past, political assistants to Ministers. They should be few and under discipline—preferably under the discipline of the Permanent Secretary—for their ethical and other behaviour. I have always favoured a Cabinet system on the European model, where they fit into the discipline of a structure. There should be expert advisers—such as the noble Lord, Lord Levene, who left us today—as there have been since the days of Lloyd George and Churchill, also fitted into discipline and structure, but not too many and not running wild; nor do we need to politicise the Civil Service itself to answer what is the usual argument for doing so. The usual argument is that the inherent bias of the Civil Service—to the left, say the Conservatives; to the right, say the socialists—stops Ministers doing what they have promised.

This is rubbish. Did the Civil Service stop Margaret Thatcher, Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson turning the previous approach to economic policy in this country upside down? Of course it did not. Did the Civil Service stop the same Government, with assistance from me, introducing the poll tax, which vanishingly few civil servants thought to be a good idea but which, after the electorate and the Cabinet endorsed it, we pursued? No, it tried to make a bad policy better, as perhaps it is doing now in other matters, but it carried it through. Only weak or muddled Ministers, or those without backing from the Prime Minister, the Cabinet or the House of Commons, complain about deep-state conspiracies stopping them from carrying out their wonderful projects. Politicisation is unnecessary for even radical Governments. That is my first point.

My second point is that this country, like all democratic countries whether or not they have written constitutions, depends on having a plurality of institutions to check and balance power. As poor delivery by Governments on what they have promised, allied to social media, feeds short-term populism, such checks and balances matter more and more if we are to avoid what the late Lord Hailsham called an “elective dictatorship”.

I do not know whether what Mr Tim Shipman wrote in his book was correct. I have heard no denials from the dramatis personae concerned. He tells how, on 4 October 2019, members of the Government and their political advisers told senior civil servants they were contemplating ordering them to break the law. He records Helen MacNamara, a deputy secretary in the Cabinet Office, replying that in that case, “None of us can work for you. The police don’t work for you; like me, they work for the Queen”. Her answer was, in my view, exactly correct but could derive only from an apolitical, confident, professional Civil Service doing its job right at the centre of government. Who is to say, whether from left or right, whether such pressure might be exerted again? Checks and balances are needed and will be needed again. One of the greatest is an independent, apolitical, professional Civil Service.